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Walking the earth like Caine in Kung-Fu

Wednesday Sep 30, 2009

Sun has recently published a white paper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the future Intel Nehalem-EX processors. With over 20 years of SMP expertise, what better OS than Solaris to run on top of Intel's future 8-socket, 64-core, 128-thread architectures? With features such as Memory Placement Optimization or Predictive Self Healing, the Solaris OS has the critical technologies necessary to large SMP architectures today. The paper discusses the collaboration between Intel and Sun to optimize Solaris for Nehalem-EX and leverage new features such as Hyper-Threading, QuickPath Technology, Turbo Boost Technology or I/O acceleration.

This is in fact a very interesting paper. It shows how Sun and Belgacom used NEBS/ETSI certified Sun Netra servers and FFAC (Full Free Air Cooling) to eliminate the CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning). To caricaturize, they used systems engineered to withstand high temperatures (Netra servers) and opened the data center windows to cool them down. Based on the results of this proof-of-concept, the projected decrease of power consumption to cool the facility down is up to 40 percent. Quite dramatic! Obviously, it probably helps if the data center is located in Belgium and not in the middle of Arizona on a hot summer day!

Sun BluePrints articles are free whitepapers, written by engineers, for engineers. Don't miss out, stay up to date and join the Sun BluePrint Community on Facebook or subscribe to the Sun BluePrints Community RSS Feed.

Monday Jun 15, 2009

The Solaris OS is optimized to take advantage of the Intel Xeon processor-based systems. The Sun BluePrint titled "The Solaris Operating System - Optimized for the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series" has just been updated with some of the latest improvements. Here are examples of what to expect from the BluePrint:

Increased Power Efficiency

An innovative Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) has been
integrated into OpenSolaris, enabling Intel Xeon processor 5500 series
to stay longer in idle states (C-states), have better granularity in
power management (P-states). The Solaris PAD has
increased awareness of the Xeon 5500, such that
the workload can be efficiently utilized on available hardware threads,
with benefits for shared pipelines, shared caches, and shared sockets.
The Solaris kernel has the ability to utilize those parts of the
processor that are active, and continue to avoid doing work on those
parts that are powered down.

Writing multi-threaded applications

The Sun Studio compilers support the OpenMP specification version 3.0. OpenMP is an API that can be used to explicitly specify multi-threaded shared-memory parallelism in C, C++, and Fortran programs. OpenMP has a rich set of directives that the programmer can use to specify parallelism in a program. This allows creating applications that will take advantage of the parallelism offered by the Hyper-Threading technology from the Xeon 5500.

Automated Energy Efficiency

PowerTOP for OpenSolaris leverages the DTrace framework to quickly and safely analyze the system without impacting performance or service levels. It gathers information about processor idle and frequency states transitions and even allows a developer or administrator to observe Intel Turbo Boost Technology operation. Normally, it is difficult to know how fast a system with Intel Turbo Boost Technology is running, as this capability is determined by the Xeon 5500 power management system. PowerTOP will be able to monitor and measure Turbo Boost.